South Africa:
"A mortal blow to racism"

by Adam Jones

[The Jordan Times (Amman), 24 July 1995.]

As
so often in South Africa, a photograph sums it up. At the moment
of victory in last month's Rugby World Cup [June 1995], François
Pienaar, captain of the Springboks, drops to one knee and raises his hands
to his face. It looks for all the world as though he is thanking
God for deliverance.

Forty-three million South Africans gloried in that June triumph.
None seemed as exuberant as President Nelson Mandela, who wore a Springboks
cap and jersey for the occasion.

Less than two months earlier, on April 26, Mr. Mandela had celebrated
a much larger deliverance. In Pretoria, the administrative capital,
Mr. Mandela commemorated Freedom Day - the first anniversary of the advent
of majority rule in South Africa. A year after his African National
Congress (ANC) swept to power and predominance in a government of national
unity, the broad consensus that paved the way for an end to white rule
still holds. And with Mr. Mandela at the helm it seems to grow stronger
by the week.

The euphoria surrounding the anniversary, which was matched and even
surpassed by the Springboks' moment of glory, could not entirely erase
a more grim reality. To be black in South Africa is still, for the
great majority, to be downtrodden, pauperised, and cruelly undereducated.
But it is no longer to suffer the thousand petty humiliations of apartheid,
to be forbidden the right to live and seek work where one chooses, and
to be denied the chance to vote for a say in one's future.

To be white is still to be inordinately privileged. In Johannesburg,
the nation's largest city, the white suburbs - with their Old Country names
like Hyde Park, Sandton, Parkwood - remain oases of space and comfort.
Mansions are the norm here, and five or six families live on each block,
compared with five or six thousand in the predominantly black neighbourhoods
closer to downtown.

Indeed, for suburban whites, it might seem that little has changed from
the luxurious days of old. Swimming pools, jacarandas, and evening
braais (barbecues) are staples of their lifestyle. There is
no shortage of black domestic workers: the white visitor to Johannesburg
can expect to be stopped in the street by middle-aged women, asking the
"boss" whether he needs any help around the house.

The consensus that led to South Africa's transition guaranteed whites
that the economy would be left largely in private (i.e., their) hands.
A Reconstruction and Development Programme is set to funnel billions of
rands into improving the lot of the black masses. But more than a
year into the era of majority rule, black-owned businesses still account
for less than half of one per cent of the capitalised value of the Johannesburg
Stock Exchange, South Africa's economic bellwether.

Over 40 per cent of employed Afrikaners (white South Africans of Dutch
descent) work for the state. To win their support for the transition,
these civil servants were assured that affirmative action would not displace
them from their jobs. Blacks, meanwhile, were guaranteed strong proactive
measures to ensure that workplaces across South Africa became more "representative"
of a society where blacks constitute three-quarters of the population.

Those best able to exploit the new environment are the members of the
small black professional class, well educated (often overseas) and upwardly
mobile. They, the editor of a local paper told me, are "black gold,"
eagerly headhunted by white-owned companies anxious to correct the embarrassing
colour imbalance in their ranks. Many of the black professionals
job-hop every few months: for higher pay, a nicer company car, or a posting
to Cape Town, away from the grime and crime of "Jo'burg."

They are the lucky ones. The government's extended honeymoon is
now at an end, and there is little doubt that it has failed to deliver
benefits to the population in line with the extravagant promises Mr. Mandela
and Co. made in the run-up to last year's elections.

A much-touted government housing scheme, for example, vowed to erect
a million dwellings over five years. Shortly before the first anniversary
of majority rule, the government grudgingly came up with a progress report:
a mere 878 houses had been built.

Millions of black South Africans still live in squalid conditions, like
the residents of the squatter camp I visited on the fringe of Soweto.
On two barren fields divided by a small stream, hundreds of tumbledown
shacks had been erected from cardboard and corrugated tin.

The impoverished residents may prove fertile ground for the "populist"
wing of the ANC, headed by Mr. Mandela's estranged wife, Winnie.
The populists have persistently pointed to the government's coziness with
the white elite, at the expense of the dispossessed millions who thrust
the ANC into office.

And yet I, a solitary white, was able to wander unmolested through the
camp, and through surrounding poor neighbourhoods of Soweto, a black township
that is now home to two million people. This shows just how far South
Africa has come from the chaos and carnage of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Even on streets where the Pan-Africanist Congress had painted one of
its favourite slogans - "One [white] settler, one bullet" - I encountered
only cheery grins and ringing "hellos" from the locals. If I was
approached, it was to ask for a coin or a cigarette, or just to chat.

Two years ago, few whites in their right minds would have entered a
township, and never alone. The war waged by the South African
state against its own people had spilled over into fratricidal bloodletting
among blacks. Hundreds were dying here, hacked by pangas (an
African killing implement resembling a machete), or mowed down by AK-47
machine guns. Whites like American student Amy Biehl, murdered near
Cape Town in 1993, were regularly targetted by Black militants.

The violence is still a palpable presence. South Africa has the
world's second highest homicide rate, after Colombia; and the overwhelming
majority of victims are black. Johannesburg is often called the world's
most dangerous city.

Whites in Jo'burg live behind high walls, and carjackings are a constant
threat: there were 3,900 of them last year in one northern suburb alone.
A friend of a friend made the mistake of resisting the robber who was about
to relieve him of his late-model BMW. The thief pulled a pistol,
held it to the owner's head, and said: "This is how it feels to die, you
white fuck." He pulled the trigger. By accident or design,
the gun didn't fire. The thief sped away with his new prize, leaving
the owner gibbering on the ground.

Rape, robbery, and street crime are endemic in Jo'burg. "Don't
walk downtown ever," one white South African told me. "Take
a taxi to where you want to go, and call for one to pick you up afterward."

But in three months in the city, I took not a single taxi. I rode
public buses and the combis, mini-buses which cater almost exclusively
to a black clientele. And I walked - for hours across Jo'burg, and
dozens of times downtown, where black street-vendors and roving entrepreneurs
have reclaimed the sidewalks from the white suit-and-tie crowd. Not
once did I encounter the slightest breath of aggression, animosity, or
even discourtesy.

Tensions and hostilities remain. In KwaZulu Natal, the leader
of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), Mangosuthu Buthelezi, pushes for more
regional autonomy, seeking to shore up his coastal power base. Clashes
between IFP and ANC supporters still claim many lives in the mining camps
and townships.

Then there are the unrepentant whites. Once, waiting for the bus
in Johannesburg, I found myself in conversation with an elderly white man
who looked back fondly on the time when no blacks could gather at the bus-stop.
Say what you will about apartheid, he told me, but "you didn't have to
put up with blacks jumping the queue."

The man is an anachronism, though there are many like him. Most
Afrikaners are accommodating themselves to the new order. Even more
readily, English South Africans have accepted that a black liberation movement
now rules the roost. "We have delivered a mortal blow to racism,"
Nelson Mandela pronounced on TV before the Freedom Day celebrations.
I believe he was right.

F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid president, plods along in his new
duties as deputy president. On television recently, Mr. Mandela praised
his performance. There was a delicious irony in witnessing this black
president, a former prisoner of white rule, passing measured judgment on
Mr. de Klerk - once Mr. Mandela's jailer, now his junior partner.

Few would argue that Mr. Mandela himself has been the glue that has
held the fragile transition together. His party may flounder, but
his personal appeal is very nearly universal. At rallies, it is others
- Deputy President and heir apparent Thabo Mbeki, for example - who get
the lukewarm claps, and Mr. Mandela the lusty cheers.

As an orator, Mr. Mandela is far from spectacular. He has a reedy
voice and a somewhat monotonous, declamatory speaking style. But
as a conversationalist and a peace-seeker, he is supreme. To see
him in a televised discussion is to marvel at the craftsmanship of his
comments, the keenness of his mind. He is a master strategist and,
most would say, a true visionary.

He also seems a humble man. Kaizer Nyatsumba, political editor
of the Johannesburg Star, told me he felt Mr. Mandela had "dictatorial
tendencies" arising from his status and self-image as a "patriarchal African
figure." But he allowed that Mr. Mandela is "a very modest man who
never takes credit for himself."

The problem, Mr. Nyatsumba said, is that "Mandela may well be everything
good, but he will not be around every time or forever. His successor
will be a very different person altogether."

And Mr. Mandela is 76. South Africans virtually across the racial
and political spectrum pray he has another ten years left in him - of life,
if not of active leadership. Long enough for the slow wheels of constitution-building
to grind to a conclusion. Long enough for the benefits of majority
rule to become apparent to the black masses.

Long enough, above all, for a new sense of society to put down firm
roots. For whites to get used to rubbing shoulders with blacks, in
the workplace and on the streets. And for blacks to move beyond forgiveness
of their former oppressors, to build a common future with white South Africans.

Sidney Mathlaku, features editor of Sowetan, the largest black-owned
paper in South Africa, indicated as much when I asked him for a vision
of his paper five years down the road. Sowetan has long had
a reputation has an organ at odds with the ANC leadership, favouring the
more radical line of the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness
movement.

"I'd love to see a paper that's not for blacks, not for whites, not
for [mixed-race] coloureds," Mr. Mathlaku told me. "Whether it's
a 'white' story or a 'black' story, if it's a good story we should put
it on page one. That's my dream."

The front-page news in South Africa these days is that things so far
are working better than almost anyone dared hope.

Books on South Africa at Amazon.com

Created by Adam Jones, 1998. No copyright claimed if source
is acknowledged and notified.adamj_jones@hotmail.comLast updated: 12 October 2000.